An old piece & one I like. I don't possess that many clothes these days :-)
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1. When I moved to Sydney, in spite of several wardrobe culls, I travelled like a Victorian, albeit on an airship and without a hatbox. Accompanying me were two outsized suitcases of Indian dresses and what I then thought was Western attire suitable to my new life. Most lie unused in the upper recesses of my cupboards; astonishingly the lower recesses have quickly filled with Australian purchases. I suppose this is because fashion and buying clothes is a feminine preoccupation I am not always immune to.
2. The nature of the clothes I buy here are very different. For one, I finally succumbed to the ghastly charcoal grey suit/white shirt de rigueur for city offices. More pleasantly, it is a chance to explore the whimsical, the eccentric and the urban peasant in you. Not possible in India, which I think of as an affluent society. For the Indian middle classes, the very newness of clothes, bright, crisp colours, neat ironing and gold jewellery are all social markers of wealth and respectability. We are conformists; our clothes mark us out for social approval. Class, if not caste, is still important in India, not wanting to be mistaken for the domestic help we dress accordingly. Sydney in contrast, in spite of its obsession with labels, celebrities and designers, has a more egalitarian ethos. For example it's perfectly respectable to forage through hand me downs and your next-door millionaire is as likely to wear a frayed T as a surfing kid.
3. Indian fashion works within narrow confines, it is beautiful, the craftsmanship exquisite but its not what can be called astonishing or eccentric. A lot here falls into the same category and much of it is sourced from India. Every once in a while though the mould is broken. Fashion here is not all form and style; it is also whimsy, oddities,and curiosities. Garments with unfinished hems and seams, slashed and distressed clothing, enormous leather flowers in neckpieces, Edwardian frock coats over jeans, faded frocks, old buttons worked into chains, faded bleached colours (all seen by me here and all invested with an intrinsic beauty) are not the stuff of Indian fashion. On the fringes Gothic fashion with its pale look and fascination for black and metal is so extreme that even mainstream fashion here has had a difficult time co-opting the look. We could never wear any of this or its Indian equivalent without an inherent discomfort, without a fear of being mocked.
4. Because fashion is seen as a feminine preoccupation, it is often looked down upon. But clothes and accessories are nothing but objects – their use as instructive as that of any of the "things" of life. For example Native American jewellery of turquoise, coral and silver pops up often in stores here and encapsulates the absurdity of human experience where entire cultures get forgotten but their cultural objects get co-opted into our momentary yet persistent desire for pleasure. Even more tellingly, the turquoise and coral are faux, plastic beads assembled together in a factory in China. The significance of the stones to American tribes is lost; what remains is tawdry artifice, mere simulation. We still respond to the aesthetic experience of the silver, blue and orange but have no sense of its history. Likewise handlooms in India have lost their regional differences. Indeed so much is the cross fertilization of designs, so much the gradual shift from weaving to printing, from cotton to polyester that we are no longer aware of the significance of region,colour, weave or pattern.
5. Precisely after six months of my life when I feel a little drunk with the thought and beauty of clothes, for the next six I return to the Thoreauvian thought of "Never trust any enterprise that requires new clothes". The indulgence in pretty clothes, the desire for possession and the absurdity of "dressing well" begin to trouble me. Virginia Woolf, an eccentric dresser, writes of an attempt to buy a hat, "green felt: the wrong coloured ribbon: all a flop like a pancake in mid air." One is arrested of course not by Woolf's fashion sense, which is immaterial, but her felicity with language. Woolf also observes with some wicked delight on the assistance women always offerto the fashion inept sister whilst well dressed women "are pecked, stoned, often die, every feather stained with blood - at the bottom of the cage". Clothes just don't seem to matter sometimes.
6. The wearing and removing of women's clothes is also invested with a certain eroticisation. A man taking off his clothes is direct; there is no teasing, no artifice as with a woman. Likewise a swathed man evokes no mystery. However, brides for example always arrive in a cornucopia of things - many layers a man must work through before his final prize. Indian movies of course make much of this. Then again, the supremely romantic moment of Monsoon Wedding is not its vulgar Punjabi wedding but the side romance replete with the ephemeral beauty of marigolds and clothes so homespun one barely notices them.
7. Coming back to Sydney, this season's offerings are bohemian, luxurious and plundered from most of the last century. Mismatched layers, shrugs, cardies, chiffon, luxe, tweeds, velvets, crocheted bits, the odd item from your grandma's closet, that kind of thing. The girls in the stores look pretty, all ruffled, romantic charm when they wear it. For the first time I just admire the clothes on girls dotting the streets like autumn flowers – but don't feel the temptation to buy some of it. It isn't that clothes don't matter at all as much as the need for possessing everything the world has to offer each passing month lessens.
8. The last word on fashion however belongs to DH Lawrence. Lawrence invests the uber bitch of Women in Love, Gudrun Brangwen, with a dramatic fashion sense, especially for the Edwardian era. Thus Gudrun has a "dress of dark blue silky stuff, with ruches of blue and green linen lace and emerald green stockings", "a grass green velour hat", "her coat is a strong blue". On another occasion Gudrun and her sister Ursula are described thus: Both girls wore light, gay summer dresses. Ursula had an orange colored knitted coat, Gudrun a pale yellow. Ursula wore canary yellow stockings, Gudrun rose. Elsewhere there are silvery velvet dresses and a soft blue dress with red stockings. Lawrence, for a heterosexual man (albeit uneasy) of the 1900s, devotes much attention to the clothing of his heroines though his most famous creation, Lady Chatterley also has a more erotic Monsoon Wedding fashion moment when the most famous gamekeeper in history says it with flowers – albeit with a twist (I am not telling, read the book). While bohemianism is stock-in-trade for fashion these days, green stockings are still not a clothing staple. Fashion these days is so much the monopoly of women and homosexuals that I do wish there would be a Lawrentian moment in fashion – not just the stockings - but having a heterosexual man write seriously of fashion.
_______________________________________________________________________________
1. When I moved to Sydney, in spite of several wardrobe culls, I travelled like a Victorian, albeit on an airship and without a hatbox. Accompanying me were two outsized suitcases of Indian dresses and what I then thought was Western attire suitable to my new life. Most lie unused in the upper recesses of my cupboards; astonishingly the lower recesses have quickly filled with Australian purchases. I suppose this is because fashion and buying clothes is a feminine preoccupation I am not always immune to.
2. The nature of the clothes I buy here are very different. For one, I finally succumbed to the ghastly charcoal grey suit/white shirt de rigueur for city offices. More pleasantly, it is a chance to explore the whimsical, the eccentric and the urban peasant in you. Not possible in India, which I think of as an affluent society. For the Indian middle classes, the very newness of clothes, bright, crisp colours, neat ironing and gold jewellery are all social markers of wealth and respectability. We are conformists; our clothes mark us out for social approval. Class, if not caste, is still important in India, not wanting to be mistaken for the domestic help we dress accordingly. Sydney in contrast, in spite of its obsession with labels, celebrities and designers, has a more egalitarian ethos. For example it's perfectly respectable to forage through hand me downs and your next-door millionaire is as likely to wear a frayed T as a surfing kid.
3. Indian fashion works within narrow confines, it is beautiful, the craftsmanship exquisite but its not what can be called astonishing or eccentric. A lot here falls into the same category and much of it is sourced from India. Every once in a while though the mould is broken. Fashion here is not all form and style; it is also whimsy, oddities,and curiosities. Garments with unfinished hems and seams, slashed and distressed clothing, enormous leather flowers in neckpieces, Edwardian frock coats over jeans, faded frocks, old buttons worked into chains, faded bleached colours (all seen by me here and all invested with an intrinsic beauty) are not the stuff of Indian fashion. On the fringes Gothic fashion with its pale look and fascination for black and metal is so extreme that even mainstream fashion here has had a difficult time co-opting the look. We could never wear any of this or its Indian equivalent without an inherent discomfort, without a fear of being mocked.
4. Because fashion is seen as a feminine preoccupation, it is often looked down upon. But clothes and accessories are nothing but objects – their use as instructive as that of any of the "things" of life. For example Native American jewellery of turquoise, coral and silver pops up often in stores here and encapsulates the absurdity of human experience where entire cultures get forgotten but their cultural objects get co-opted into our momentary yet persistent desire for pleasure. Even more tellingly, the turquoise and coral are faux, plastic beads assembled together in a factory in China. The significance of the stones to American tribes is lost; what remains is tawdry artifice, mere simulation. We still respond to the aesthetic experience of the silver, blue and orange but have no sense of its history. Likewise handlooms in India have lost their regional differences. Indeed so much is the cross fertilization of designs, so much the gradual shift from weaving to printing, from cotton to polyester that we are no longer aware of the significance of region,colour, weave or pattern.
5. Precisely after six months of my life when I feel a little drunk with the thought and beauty of clothes, for the next six I return to the Thoreauvian thought of "Never trust any enterprise that requires new clothes". The indulgence in pretty clothes, the desire for possession and the absurdity of "dressing well" begin to trouble me. Virginia Woolf, an eccentric dresser, writes of an attempt to buy a hat, "green felt: the wrong coloured ribbon: all a flop like a pancake in mid air." One is arrested of course not by Woolf's fashion sense, which is immaterial, but her felicity with language. Woolf also observes with some wicked delight on the assistance women always offerto the fashion inept sister whilst well dressed women "are pecked, stoned, often die, every feather stained with blood - at the bottom of the cage". Clothes just don't seem to matter sometimes.
6. The wearing and removing of women's clothes is also invested with a certain eroticisation. A man taking off his clothes is direct; there is no teasing, no artifice as with a woman. Likewise a swathed man evokes no mystery. However, brides for example always arrive in a cornucopia of things - many layers a man must work through before his final prize. Indian movies of course make much of this. Then again, the supremely romantic moment of Monsoon Wedding is not its vulgar Punjabi wedding but the side romance replete with the ephemeral beauty of marigolds and clothes so homespun one barely notices them.7. Coming back to Sydney, this season's offerings are bohemian, luxurious and plundered from most of the last century. Mismatched layers, shrugs, cardies, chiffon, luxe, tweeds, velvets, crocheted bits, the odd item from your grandma's closet, that kind of thing. The girls in the stores look pretty, all ruffled, romantic charm when they wear it. For the first time I just admire the clothes on girls dotting the streets like autumn flowers – but don't feel the temptation to buy some of it. It isn't that clothes don't matter at all as much as the need for possessing everything the world has to offer each passing month lessens.
8. The last word on fashion however belongs to DH Lawrence. Lawrence invests the uber bitch of Women in Love, Gudrun Brangwen, with a dramatic fashion sense, especially for the Edwardian era. Thus Gudrun has a "dress of dark blue silky stuff, with ruches of blue and green linen lace and emerald green stockings", "a grass green velour hat", "her coat is a strong blue". On another occasion Gudrun and her sister Ursula are described thus: Both girls wore light, gay summer dresses. Ursula had an orange colored knitted coat, Gudrun a pale yellow. Ursula wore canary yellow stockings, Gudrun rose. Elsewhere there are silvery velvet dresses and a soft blue dress with red stockings. Lawrence, for a heterosexual man (albeit uneasy) of the 1900s, devotes much attention to the clothing of his heroines though his most famous creation, Lady Chatterley also has a more erotic Monsoon Wedding fashion moment when the most famous gamekeeper in history says it with flowers – albeit with a twist (I am not telling, read the book). While bohemianism is stock-in-trade for fashion these days, green stockings are still not a clothing staple. Fashion these days is so much the monopoly of women and homosexuals that I do wish there would be a Lawrentian moment in fashion – not just the stockings - but having a heterosexual man write seriously of fashion.
So many thoughtful points in this post! It's really true about people here (in India) being more conscious of class distinctions. I also think that here (with my only other comparison being New York), people dress more to impress rather than because it's a personal expression of style. Flaunting wealth through designer labels is important here.
ReplyDeleteWhat you said about the fear of being mocked is also true. I've been dyeing to wear one of those African head wraps - seems so perfect for the heat and looks cool too, but the usual "what would people say" voice tells me not to! It's the same voice that sometimes prevents me from designing more adventurous clothing.
On another note, when I first opened my store, I had so many "dull" earthy colours- very reflective of my point of reference after NY- and my biggest complaint was that my clothes were not colourful enough!
Its so true about the "dull" colours, isn't it?! And I don't understand why we don't have head wraps in our heat - I totally agree on that. When I wore it I heard many wisecracks on having had a head bath :-)
ReplyDeleteI think things will change in India - there is already a greater appreciation of being quirky/different. It needs some sort of critical mass of an "indie" movement I think. So maybe you should experiment once in awhile :-)